Free Agents Not Being Signed
 

As discussed in this thread:

I have a league set up where the MLB does not have a draft. The minimum time for achieving FA status is just one year. So all players in the world are available every year unless their teams lock them up in multi-year deals. And leagues are all set to allow FA's to sign anywhere. The exception is that there is a 50-team HS feeder league that feeds a draft for a 12-team American Legion league.

There are a handful of rookie level independent leagues along with one A and one AA independents, as well as affiliated AAA and AA leagues for the fictional MLB. The idea is that the best high school players will be drafted into the American Legion league (set at college level) and play at least a year there, while the others will become free agents and wander around the baseball world, mostly signing with the several rookie-level independent leagues. From there, the A level and AA level leagues will cull that talent and develop it, with the MLB-equivalent big league of ten teams scouting and pulling talent from all over, mostly probably from the American Legion league and the independent AA and AAA leagues, which themselves should have filtered the best talent from the 50 HS teams. The idea is for every player in the universe to be created at the HS level.

A lot of players do move around leagues, and it seems to work ok. But a lot of the players currently in MLB (13 years simmed) appear to have just been created some year in MLB because they don't have any history from HS leagues or any others. The idea was for MLB to not create any players but instead bring in players from the multitude of other leagues. It's frustrating right now because there are studs who become FA's from the lower leagues, whose teams are unable to afford their newer contract demands, and who then sit in the FA pool while MLB teams could use their talents and afford their salaries.

FA Comp is set to off, 80% of big-league teams are financially able to sign the top guys in the FA pool at their asking prices, at least a couple dozen of which range from average to star-quality. Player eval is 70% ratings / 17-8-5 stats. All ammy drafts are off except for the American Legion League, as noted, and all leagues are set to allow FA's to sign with other leagues.

I have a saved world template if that would help. In the meantime, I am going to fiddle with things a bit and see if I can fix it. It might be something simple that I'm overlooking.

Sounds like "create and maintain hidden players" is enabled.:)

Yeah, it's checked and grayed out so that I can't uncheck it. I'm not too familiar with what it does other than the obvious implications of the name of the option.

I think what Fidel was trying to imply was that, since you've enabled 'create and maintain hidden players', scouts are out scouting the world beyond your leagues and finding (and signing) players that were created and hidden. These would be the players that are showing up without any history.